Archive for February, 2009

We’re a few weeks out from St. Patrick’s Day, 2009! To celebrate the day when everyone wants to be Irish, we suggest that you use our St. Patrick’s day themed bingo cards template. It’s fun and simple. And best of all, in 5 minutes or less you can customize them to suit your special event.

As always, printing a few cards for your small get together using print-bingo.com is free. We do reserve a few extra features of our excellent bingo card generating site for those who choose to upgrade for only $10!

People who have never had to make a website often wonder, why don’t people use nicer or unique fonts?

People who make the websites wish that they could!

I know that I’m bored with Verdana, Arial, and Times New Roman (or their Apple equivalents). But, since we can’t guarantee that every computer will have every font, that’s pretty much what we are stuck using.

While we can’t change the font of the main content of our webpages, we do use some tricks to get nice headers. In fact, we’ve just updated print-bingo.com’s decorative font headers. We’ve had them for a couple years, but our (now) older software tool didn’t work with the latest Adobe Flash Player, version 10. We’ve also changed the font that we use… we hope you like it.

I hate it when people with vacuous business models try to sap my web reputation and waste my time.

Earlier this week, Google sent me a friendly note with the subject line: “Removal from Google’s Index.” My first thought was that it was a scam or a phishing attempt. But no, after examining the links carefully and doing a couple web searches, it turned out to be legit.

A blog we host was running WordPress version 1.5. It’s not an active blog. It’s up for posterity, so we didn’t really care that it was several versions out of date. Unfortunately, that version of WordPress, and everything prior to 2.5.1 (I think), is exploitable.

In our case, it had been hacked to have hidden text links for run-of-the-mill spam links such as porn, pharmaceuticals, etc. In fact, the links appear to have changed a few times over the week or more that it had been compromised. Google noticed, and told us to get rid of the spam links or else it would be booted out of it’s search results.

So, upgrade WordPress we did. Overall, cleaning up the mess wasn’t too bad. It could have been worse.

The moral of this story? Do backups. Check for upgrades of software every once in a while (yeah right). And make sure that one or more of these email addresses work: contact@yourdomain.com, info@yourdomain.com, support@yourdomain.com, webmaster@yourdomain.com. These are the addresses to which Google addressed the email.

My wish? That WordPress and other common web applications had a single line in their FAQ that said in 100% unambiguous language what was the minimum version of software that was free of exploits. I looked for several minutes to see if this blog, running WordPress 2.5.1 was ‘safe’. In the end, I couldn’t tell, so I decided to upgrade to 2.7 while I had all the files handy.